Cluj IT Days, which this year has reached its third edition, reunites the Transylvanian IT community around the same passion: the development of software and hardware products. If in 2014, the reference topic within the leadership section was the transition from outsourcing to product, this year our topic is the release of Romanian products. Therefore, it is not by chance that the event is going to start by a series of presentations subordinated to this theme – states Ovidiu Mățan, founder and organizer, in his introductory article about Cluj IT Days 2015.

In the same article, the organizers present their hope to raise the public’s interest by listing some of the essential aspects of these presentations:

• Vector Watch – one of the most ambitious Romanian products, the Romanian smartwatch, a novel arrival on the Romanian market.

• A first demo developed on HTC Vice by the Exosyphen game studio. Provided that we receive the approval of HTC, we shall have a stand where users will be able to test the virtual reality.

• The first Romanian management game: PM Galaxy, developed by Colors in Projects. An introduction of the concept of game in project management.

• The launching of programez.ro – the latest initiative of Today Software Magazine, conceived as a challenge addressed to all programmers. Vlad Derdeicea from Subsign is our guest who will talk about how the entire concept was created visually.

• Christoph Steindl, CEO Catalysts Software, will talk about how to turn the creative potential to profit within a company and about the importance of the way people work.

According to the agenda, the break will be followed by two sections having technical, management or start-up topics, which will unfold simultaneously, giving thus the participants the chance to choose between the different subjects.

In the following lines, some basic information related to these sections:

Java

The section begins with the presentation of Peter Lawrey, a special guest for this edition, too. He is the Stack Overflow chart with over 11,000 answers, and this year he has been nominated Java Champion by Oracle. He has published over 250 articles on his blog, Vanilla Java, where he has had more than three million views until now. His company, Chronicle Software, develops high performance solutions for the banking domain, the developed libraries being available on GitHub.

His first presentation in Cluj IT Days, Work with Hundreds of Hot Terabytes in JVMs, will also be presented this year in Java One, in San Francisco. For those who are interested in Java performance, Peter will lead a separate workshop, on which you can find more details in the workshops chapter.

Next, a presentation delivered by Vasile Mihali: Be Fast, Be O-JVM, Be Chronicle-Queue, which presents a practical usage of the libraries developed by Peter Lawrey. In the end of this section, Silviu Dumitrescu, an old collaborator of our magazine, will talk about JOOQ – an object modeling of interaction with relational data bases.

Management

In this domain, you will have the opportunity to meet people who have been close to and have supported TSM magazine along time. Adina Grogoriu, the colleague of Simona Bonghez, whom you probably know from the PMP trainings, will talk about “GamEventify!”, the adding of the gamification concept in conferences and events. This is a concept you will be able to explore within the workshop dedicated to it within Cluj IT Days.

The next presentation will be delivered by Dan Suciu, whom the public knows from the previous Cluj IT Days editions and also from the articles published in Today Software Magazine. His passion for programming and Agile methodologies is well-known, and his presentation will certainly prove it once more.

Cristian Philipp will come from Timisoara to talk about what it means to build a powerful company brand by using the organizational culture. At the end of this section, Alexandru Boloboaca will share with us some of his experience with software craftsmanship.

Big Data

A fashionable topic nowadays.  Just like last year, Tudor Marghidanu will deliver a presentation from the perspective of a software architect. Tudor Lapusanu is next, with data modelling in Apache Hadoop, and finally, Daniel Sarbe will talk about machine learning and the connection with big data.

Testing

We will analyze Selenium Webdriver from Vasile Pop’s (Vic’s) perspective. The remaining slots are still open; any proposal will be taken into consideration.

Start-ups and entrepreneurship

The Romanian startup area will present two programs that are different in approach, but which support local initiatives, namely Seedfortech and TechLeague. Moreover, Serban Tir from CTO Gemini will talk about startups and acceleration programs based on his daily experience in this domain. Christoph Steindl, CEO Catalyst, will approach Growth Hacking and Lean Canvas from a practical perspective.

At the end of this section, we will have a startup pitch session, during which we will try to bring the most interesting local startups on stage.

Research

Through this section Cluj IT Days is trying to bring the latest achievements of this domain to focus and at the same time to bring the academic world and the local IT environment together. Razvan Florian will present a research carried out on the possibility of generation of automatic software. It is a novel approach and Florian hopes not to offend the programmers attending. Another presentation will be on autonomous driving.

Hands On Lab

After last year’s success with the presentation of the 3D printer built by Professor Mihai Oltean, the OC decided to make a Hands On Lab section, so that the presentations be closer to the audience. The audience will be able to better understand the stages and the examples of code written for the printing of a 3D object.

Peter Lawrey will be present again, closer to the audience, with his presentation called Low Latency in Java 8, from which you may learn how to use the facilities of Java 8 language in order to write low latency applications more easily or how we can tune the garbage collector when using Lambda constructions.

Still in this section, how to program an industrial robot will be showcased.

Motivation for participating

IT Days is meant to be a festive celebration of the activity of the entire year, together with the whole IT community from Cluj, given the fact that Today Software Magazine organizes monthly events. If you want to be up to date with the latest software trends of the local community in the sections above, then the event will surely respond to your needs. Just like in the last years, there will be a friendly atmosphere and high professional level presentations. During the breaks, there will be the opportunity to see, in the displayed stands, innovative products and initiatives of the local companies.

Most of the participants will be programmers, followed by managers and testers. Actually, the share of the domain chosen for presentations follows this trend.

Workshops

Java Performance

Just like in the previous years, one day before the conference, on November 23rd, two workshops will take place. One of them is the Java Performance workshop, led by Peter Lawrey, where the people attending will have the chance to discover: an advanced review on the manner in which JVM uses memory, the usage of Lambda structures from Java 8 to the limit and beyond that, the usage of Chronicle Engine hands-on.

The second workshop, Let’s have fun and learn – Project Management by using PM Galaxy Boardgame, represents an introduction to project management. The game will lead the participants through all the stages of development of a project: initialization, planning, execution, monitoring and control, completion. The participants will have to deal with traps, challenges and they will experience best practices with the help of the game especially developed for this workshop: PM Galaxy. The workshop will be hosted by Simona Bonghez. You can find more details on www.itdays.ro.

Source: http://todaysoftmag.com/article/1613/cluj-it-days-2015

in 2015, has been followed through due to the dilligencies of the managerial team. More information on the outcome of this event and QIV/2015 actions will follow.